Insurance companies overcharging Medicare subscribers for prescriptions...

[cynatnite]

WASHINGTON — If you buy medicine through Medicare's prescription drug program, you could be paying too much.

The taxpayers who finance Medicare aren't doing too well, either.

Insurance companies involved in the Medicare prescription drug benefit have overcharged subscribers and taxpayers by several billion dollars, according to the inspector general for the Department of Health and Human Services . Eighty percent of the participating insurance companies owe the program an estimated $4.4 billion for 2006 alone.

Medicare , however, has been slow to do something about it. In fact, the agency doesn't even know how much money the insurance companies owe taxpayers because it hasn't begun most of the financial audits needed to determine that.

"It shows a mindset that could care less about wasting taxpayer money, that has no problem with padding profits of drug companies with hard-earned taxpayer dollars," said Sen. Claire McCaskill , a Missouri Democrat.

McCaskill, a former state auditor, has asked the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services , which administers the program, to explain why so many audits haven't been done and how it plans to collect the $4.4 billion .

http://news.yahoo.com/s/mcclatchy/20090201/pl_mcclatchy/3157367

color me not surprised. :grr:

[elleng]

1. The system is so confusing (deliberately)

that I can't imagine how audits COULD be done!

[nc4bo]

2. Obama: This shit needs fixin'!

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/01/16/politics/washingtonpost/main4727711.shtml

President-elect Barack Obama pledged yesterday to shape a new Social Security and Medicare "bargain" with the American people, saying that the nation's long-term economic recovery cannot be attained unless the government finally gets control over its most costly entitlement programs.

That discussion will begin next month, Obama said, when he convenes a "fiscal responsibility summit" before delivering his first budget to Congress. He said his administration will begin confronting the issues of entitlement reform and long-term budget deficits soon after it jump-starts job growth and the stock market.

"What we have done is kicked this can down the road. We are now at the end of the road and are not in a position to kick it any further," he said. "We have to signal seriousness in this by making sure some of the hard decisions are made under my watch, not someone else's."

[williesgirl]

3. Off to the greatest page - get these fuckers NOW.

[Kansas Wyatt]

4. This is the reason insurance companies should NOT be included in any...

Government health care program. They are thieves and cannot be trusted.

[Triana]

5. Insurance companies need to be shut down as in 'out of business', IMO -

they shouldn't be included in any health care program.

Healthcare should not be a profit-based "industry".